This year the Technoscience Salon brings scholars and practitioners together to cultivate decolonial feminist technoscientific practices and potentials, in efforts to move towards less violent, more livable, worlds. Over the course of the academic year we will convene public events on the themes of refusal, resistance, resurgence, protocol, sensing, and land-body relations, with a focus on Indigenous scholars. One of our goals this year will be to thicken and support an intersectional and decolonial feminist community working on questions of technology and science here in Toronto.

Upcoming Events:

Tipi Confessions is comprised of sexually-themed performances that take creative research methodologies to the stage. Three Indigenous women from the University of Alberta—Professors Kim TallBear and Tracy Bear, and social media maven Kirsten Lindquist produce several Tipi Confessions shows annually in Edmonton, across Canada, and internationally. With advising from University of Alberta drama faculty, and with mentoring from the original Bedpost Confessions™ in Austin, Texas, Tipi Confessions Indigenizes sexy storytelling and performance.The show is a key initiative of ReLab, a research-creation laboratory founded by Dr. TallBear at the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. Foregrounding Indigenous analytics, standpoints, and contemporary practices, the ReLab produces research, performance, and art. With good relations in mind, that research and creative practice intersect two areas of inquiry, Indigenous sexualities and Indigenous “naturecultures.”

Kim TallBear is Associate Professor, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta, and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment. She is building a research hub in Indigenous Science, Technology, and Society. TallBear is author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Her Indigenous STS work recently turned to also address decolonial and Indigenous sexualities. She founded a University of Alberta arts-based research lab and co-produces the sexy storytelling show, Tipi Confessions, sparked by the popular Austin, Texas show, Bedpost Confessions. Building on lessons learned with geneticists about how race categories get settled, TallBear is working on a book that interrogates settler-colonial commitments to settlement in place, within disciplines, and within monogamous, state-sanctioned marriage. She is a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota.

Moderator: Michelle Murphy (University of Toronto)

This event is a part of Indelible Refusal and co-hosted with The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. It is free and all are welcome.

Indelible Refusal is sponsored by the Jackman Humanities Institute, The Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Toronto, Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, Sexual Diversity Studies University of Toronto, The Centre for Comparative Literature, University of Toronto, and the Centre for Indigenous Studies, University of Toronto.